Day 39 : And Then There Were Four

Tatooine Sand Reclamation has grown! There are now four of us with the addition of a fellow miner and explorer I’ve met in my home system. Four people doing a tax dodge while learning the basics so that they can get out there and (l)earn more.

Various conversations I have today in the new corp indicate that we might be back to three or even two at some point in the next few days and weeks. The EVE experience has started to pale for my friends. I can understand this, it isn’t for everyone and to some the start can seem a like a bit of a grind. I didn’t notice any of that because I’d thrown myself headlong into figuring out what was going on. I then began making my own way through the game without the mission system, making my own story up as I went along.

The mission system is okay. It feels a bit spartan compared to other MMOs but it follows the same path. Go here and get this, kill all these angry dudes, come back and get reputation points and cash. Combat in low level missions can seem a little repetitive and the options for control of the ships can feel limited after playing other MMOs . This feeling faded quickly for me. In part I got used to ship control and felt I was getting enough out of it once I had the spacial awareness to recognise the advantages of moving where I wanted, and optimising my attack runs for the weapons I was carrying. It is more of a tactical and strategy approach compared to the personal  control of character provided by Warcraft and its clones. Once I'd been through a final mission in a series and had to really make some decisions about targets it was better. Yes, I am going to destroy cruise missile batteries before thinking about doing anything else.

In order to try looking at missions a bit more I’ve boosted my Connections skill which will allow me to instantly get the reputation to do level 2 missions. I took up a few Distribution missions to try and gauge the difficulty of the easiest type of mission. They were very easy and yet had very low return unless there was a mission going the same way or one on the return trip. On the up side I did end up hauling cows at one point which made me feel a little like Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly. Bonus!


I'm lagging behind on the blogging and hammering in these posts in the tiny amounts of free time I have between work and researching EVE, hence the lack of proof reading, grammar and any form of structure. Cheers to Steel for doing some proof reading! Anybody else, just let me know and I'll fix it. 


At some point I'll have to consider stopping blogging day by day but at the moment I feel like the journal format might have some benefit to other new players, should they discover it. At least they might feel less like a total Space Noob.